Gun-rights backers work to thwart Obama rifle sales reporting rule

House Republicans, accusing President Obama of waging a war on gun owners, plan to cut off funding for an administration rule requiring firearms dealers in border states to report multiple sales of certain rifles.

The matter has become a hot issue on both sides of the national gun control divide, elevating the debate over the Second Amendment in an election year in which the president is struggling to win again in pro-gun swing states such as New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Virginia.

Obama has vowed to veto the House’s plan to prohibit the government from enforcing the border-state reporting requirement, which is contained in a larger $51 billion spending package. House floor debate on the package began Tuesday and could continue into next week.

“The Obama administration fundamentally dislikes guns, and more importantly it distrusts gun owners,” said Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., author of the de-funding provision. “They also know that a frontal assault on the Second Amendment would be political suicide, so instead they’ve sought to undermine gun rights more subtly.”

At issue is an Obama administration rule that requires about 8,500 firearms dealers in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California to notify the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives every time they sell two or more high-powered rifles to the same customer within five days. The White House said the mandate, implemented last August, was designed to curb gun sales to agents of violent Mexican drug cartels.

The rule prompted protests and lawsuits from gun rights advocates who argued the president overstepped his legal authority to regulate firearms transactions.

“We’re being treated more or less like criminals,” said Alex Hamilton, a San Antonio gunsmith and dealer who specializes in remodeling antique weaponry. “It’s very discriminatory.”

Gun control advocates such as Dennis Henigan, vice president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, say the move by House Republicans is “anti-law-enforcement.” The administration’s action “is allowing ATF to make cases against straw buyers and gun traffickers that ATF could not make before the rule went into effect,” Henigan said.

ATF officials insist the requirement already has yielded information agents are using to break up Mexican cartel gun-trafficking rings. Since August, ATF has received over 3,000 reports involving more than 7,300 rifles. Texas gun dealers have submitted 1,900 reports involving over 4,600 rifles — the highest of the four states.

The reports have sparked the opening of 120 criminal investigations, ATF officials say. Those in turn have led to 25 prosecutions of more than 100 defendants.

Officials point to a Texas case in which a gun dealer’s multiple-sales reports helped pinpoint an arms trafficker who purchased 28 weapons from a dealer in McAllen. Agents so far have arrested nine individuals in the trafficker’s ring.

Since the 1970s, ATF has required all gun dealers nationwide to report multiple sales of handguns. That requirement was written into the landmark 1968 Gun Control Act, enacted following the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy.

But gun-rights advocates argue the Obama administration must seek congressional approval if it wants to extend the handgun requirement to rifles — something that’s not likely to happen as long as gun-friendly Republicans control the House.

The administration’s unilateral action “puts our industry on a regulatory slippery slope,” said Lawrence Keane, senior vice president and general counsel of the Newtown, Conn.-based National Shooting Sports Foundation, which represents gun manufacturers, importers, wholesalers and retailers. “There is no limit to what ATF can require.”

The 1968 law is enough, Keane said, because it “represents a balancing of competing interests between the legitimate needs of law enforcement to trace firearms, and the needs of dealers and rights of gun owners. We think ATF has upset the apple cart.”

Keane’s foundation and two Arizona firearms dealers, backed by the National Rifle Association, sued ATF. A federal judge here ruled against them earlier this year. They are appealing.

The Obama White House has tip-toed around the gun issue, declining calls to reinstate California Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s assault weapons ban that lasted from 1994 until its expiration in 2004. Obama also didn’t oppose the Democratic Congress’ approval in 2010 of a measure permitting guns in national parks.

The White House had delayed implementing the rifle rule for over year, reportedly because then White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel feared it would cost some Democratic incumbents their jobs in the 2010 election.

But President Obama acted last year in the wake of months of Republican hammering over the botched Operation Fast and Furious, in which ATF used watch-and-wait tactics on cartel-linked gun purchasers in the Phoenix area and lost track of over 2,000 weapons that slipped into Mexico.

Two of those weapons were recovered in December 2010 in Southern Arizona at the murder site of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.

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